Through its various features, social networks provide access to a variety of digital content, including multimedia content containing, for example, text, video, audio, presentations, or images. These and other forms of digital content (hereafter referred to as “content”) allow social network users to, for example, communicate with one another through electronic messaging, chat rooms, postings, and message boards. Users often access social networks and their associated content through a standalone application (e.g., a mobile application dedicated to the social network or a web browser capable of accessing a web page of the social network) operating on a client device, such as a desktop computer, a laptop computer, a tablet computing device, or a data-enabled mobile phone.
Typically, as a user requests access to content provided by the social network, the standalone application downloads the requested content, in whole or in part, to the client device in order to facilitate access to the content through the standalone application. Due in part to the fact that social networks often rely on computer networks for data transfer of their content to the client device, access to the content may be delayed or inefficient based on computer network conditions (e.g., the client device's network connection speed). This may be particularly troubling when the content is being accessed at the client device as the content is being streamed to the client device.